One of Abdullah’s contacts smuggled us, whispering, into a room adjoining that taken by the three Africans. We pressed our ears to the connecting wall, and could hear their voices clearly. They were joking, and talking about trivial, unrelated things. Finally, one of them made a remark that tightened the skin on my skull and face with dread.
‘He got that medal,’ one of them said. Around his neck. That medal is gold. I want that gold medal.’
‘I like them shoes, them boots he got,’ another voice said. ‘I want them shoes.’
They went on to talk about their plan. They argued a little. One of the men was more forceful. The others agreed, at last, with his idea to follow me from Leopold’s all the way to the quiet car park beneath my apartment building and then beat me until I was dead, and strip my body.
It was bizarre, standing in the dark and listening to the details of my own murder. My stomach dropped and tightened on a curdling mix of nausea and rage. I hoped to hear some clue, some reference to a motive, but they never mentioned one. Abdullah was listening with his left ear against the thin partition, and I was listening with my right. Our eyes were only a hand’s width apart. The signal to move, when I nodded my head, was a gesture so faint and subtle that it was as if our minds had spoken the message.
Vikram, Abdullah, and I stood outside the door to their room, with a passkey poised over the lock. We counted down three … two … one … then I turned the key and tried the door. It wasn’t locked from the inside. I stood back, and kicked it open. There was a second, three seconds, of utter stillness, as the surprised and frightened men stared at us, their jaws gaping and their eyes bulging. Nearest to us was a tall, very solid man with a bald head, and deep scars cut into his cheeks in a regular pattern. He wore a singlet and boxer shorts. Standing behind him was a slightly shorter man, who was dressed only in jockey shorts. He was bending over a waist-high dressing table, poised in the act of snorting a line of heroin. The third man was shorter still, but very thick in the chest and arms. He lay on one of the three beds, at the furthest corner of the room, holding a Playboy magazine in his hands. There was a strong smell in the room. It was the smell of sweat and fear. Some of it was mine.
Abdullah closed the door of the room behind him, very slowly and gently, and locked it. He was wearing black: he almost always wore a black shirt and pants. Vikram was dressed in his black cowboy rig. By some chance, I too wore a black T-shirt and black trousers. We must’ve looked like the members of some club, or gang, to the goggle-eyed men in the room.
‘What the fuck —’ the big man bellowed.
I ran at him and rammed a fist into his mouth, but he had time to raise his hands. We grabbed at each other, fists flying, and locked in a hard grapple.
Vikram sprang for the man on the bed. Abdullah closed on the man at the dresser. It was a short fight, and a dirty one. There were six of us—six big men in a small room. There was nowhere to go but into each other.
Abdullah finished his man quickly. I heard a frightened shriek, choked off, as Abdullah snapped a hard, straight, right hand to the man’s throat. From the corner of my eye, I was aware that the solid man fell back, grasping and clutching at his throat. The man on the bed jumped to his feet and kicked outward, trying to use the advantage of high ground. Abdullah and Vikram tipped the bed up, sending the man sprawling behind it. They leapt over the upturned bed and fell on him, stomping and kicking him until he stopped moving.
I held the strap of the big man’s singlet with my left hand, and pounded at him with my right. Ignoring the blows to his head, he managed to get his hands around my neck, and started to squeeze. My throat locked tight. I knew that the breath I held in me was the last until I finished him. I reached out for his face, desperately, with my right hand. My thumb found his eye. I wanted to push it into his brain, but he moved his head, and the thumb slipped between the eye and the hard ridge of bone at his temple. I drove the thumb in harder and deeper until I gouged his eye from the socket, and it hung there from bloody strands. I tried to reach it, to rip it away or to dig my thumb into the empty socket, but he pulled back to the limit of his reach. The eye hung out on his cheek, and I swung my fist at his head, trying to crush it.
He was a hard man. He didn’t give up. His hands squeezed tighter. My neck was strong and the muscles were well developed, but I knew he had the strength to kill me. My hand reached, groping for the pistol in my pocket. I had to shoot him. I had to kill him. That was all right. I didn’t care. The air in my lungs was spent, and my brain was exploding in Mandelbrot whirls of colored light, and I was dying, and I wanted to kill him.
Vikram crashed a heavy wooden stool into the back of the big man’s bald head. It’s not as easy to knock a man out as it seems in the movies. It’s true that a lucky hit can do it in one shot, but I’ve been hit with iron bars, lumps of wood, boots, and many hard fists, and I’ve only ever been knocked out once in my life. Vikram slammed the heavy stool into the back of the man’s head five times, with all of his strength, before the big man buckled and fell. He was defeated, and groggy. The back of his head was pulpy. I knew that his skull was fractured in several places. Somehow, he was still conscious.
We worked on them for half an hour, overcoming their initial reluctance to talk. Raheem joined us, speaking in English and their Nigerian dialect. Their passports told us who they were—Nigerian citizens, on tourist visas. Other information in their wallets and luggage told us where they’d stayed in Lagos before they came to Bombay. Little by little, the story emerged. They were muscle: hit men, sent by a gangster in Lagos to punish me for a major heroin and Mandrax tablet deal that had gone wrong. The deal involved some sixty thousand dollars—money that their boss in Lagos had lost in a hustle in Bombay. The hustler, whoever he was, had nominated me as the mastermind of the plan; the man responsible for ripping off the money.
The hired thugs surrendered that much information, but then they balked. They didn’t want to give me the man’s name. They didn’t want to tell me who’d set me up. They didn’t want to betray him without the express permission of their Nigerian boss. We insisted, and they were persuaded. The man’s name was Maurizio Belcane.
I put the big man’s eye back into its socket, but it stared out at a strange angle. From the way that he turned his head to look at me, I guessed that he couldn’t see out of it, yet, and I suspected that it would never sit correctly again. We closed the eye with tape, bandaged his head, and tidied the other men up. Then I spoke to them.
‘These men will take you to the airport. You’re gonna wait in the car park. There’s a plane to Lagos tomorrow morning. You’re gonna be on it. We’re gonna buy the tickets with your money. And get this straight—I had nothing to do with this. That’s not your fault—it’s Maurizio’s—but that doesn’t make me any happier about it. I’m gonna fix Maurizio, for lying about me. That’s my business, now. You can go back to your boss, and tell him that Maurizio will get what’s coming to him. But if you ever come back here, we’ll kill you. Understand? You come back to Bombay, you die.’
‘Yeah, you fuckin’ understand?’ Vikram shouted at them, lashing out with a kick. ‘You come here and fuck with Indians, you fuckin’ fuck-heads] India is finished for you! You come back here and I will personally cut off your fuckin’ balls] Do you see my hat? You see the mark on my fuckin’ hat, you fuckin’ bahinchhua? You put a mark on my fuckin’ hat! You don’t fuck with an Indian guy’s hat] You don’t fuck with Indian guys for any reason, hat or no hat! Not ever! And especially not, if they do wear a hat!’
I left them, and took a cab to Ulla’s new apartment. She would know where Maurizio was, if anyone knew. My throat was aching, and I could hardly talk. The gun in my pocket was all I could think about. It swelled, in my mind, until it was huge: until the pattern of ridges on the handle was as large as the wale of bark on a cork tree. It was a Walther P38, one of the best semi-automatic pistols ever made. It fired a 9mm round from an eight-shot magazine, and in my mind I saw all eight
of them punch their way into Maurizio’s body. I mumbled the name, Maurizio, Maurizio, and a voice in my head, a voice that I knew very well, said, Get rid of the gun before you see him …
I knocked hard on the door of the apartment, and when Lisa opened it I brushed past her to find Ulla sitting on a couch in the lounge room. She was crying. She looked up when I entered, and I saw that her left eye was swollen, as if she’d been hit.
‘Maurizio’ I said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Lin, I can’t,’ she sobbed. ‘Modena …’
‘I’m not interested in Modena. I want Maurizio. Tell me where he is!’
Lisa tapped me on the arm. I turned, and noticed for the first time that she had a large kitchen knife in her hand. She jerked her head toward the nearest bedroom. I looked at Ulla, and then back to Lisa. She nodded at me, slowly.
He was hiding in a wardrobe. When I dragged him out, into the room, he pleaded with me, begging me not to hurt him. I grabbed the belt at the back of his trousers, and marched him to the door of the apartment. He screamed for help, and I hit him in the face with the pistol. He screamed again, and I hit him again, much harder. His lips parted, and he wanted to cry out, once more, but I beat him to it, crunching the gun into the top of his head as he flinched away. He was quiet.
Lisa snarled at him, brandishing the knife.
‘You’re lucky I didn’t put this in your guts, you son of a bitch! If you ever hit her again, I’ll kill you!’
‘What did he want here?’ I asked her.
‘It’s all about the money. Modena’s got it. Ulla called Maurizio —’
She stopped, shocked by the fury she saw on my face as I glared at Ulla.
‘I know, I know, she wasn’t supposed to call anyone. But she did, and she told him about this place. She was supposed to meet them both, here, tonight. But Modena didn’t show. It’s not her fault, Lin. She didn’t know Maurizio put you in it. He just told us about it, then, a minute ago. He told us he gave your name to a couple of Nigerian thugs. He put you in it, to save himself. He said he had to have the money, to get away, because they’d be after him when they were finished with you. The hero was trying to beat it out of her, where Modena is, when you got here.’
‘Where’s the money?’ I asked Ulla.
‘I don’t know, Lin,’ she cried. ‘Fuck the money! I didn’t want it in the first place. Modena was ashamed that I was working. He doesn’t understand. I rather would work on the street, and keep him safe, than have this crazy thing happen. He loves me. He loves me. He didn’t have any-thing to do with you and the Nigerians, Lin, I swear it. That was Maurizio’s idea. It’s been going on for weeks now. That’s what I’ve been so scared about. And then tonight, Modena got hold of the money Maurizio stole—the money he stole from the Africans—and he hid it. He did it for me. He loves me, Lin. Modena loves me.’
She trailed off in stuttering sobs. I turned to Lisa.
‘I’m taking him with me.’
‘Good!’ she snapped.
‘Will you be okay?’
‘Yeah. We’re fine.’
‘Have you got any money?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry.’
‘I’ll send Abdullah as soon as I can. Keep the doors locked, and don’t let anyone in but us, okay?’
‘You got it,’ she smiled. ‘Thanks, Gilbert. That’s the second time you came riding to the rescue.’
‘Forget it.’
‘No. I won’t forget it,’ she said, closing and locking the door behind us.
I wish I could say that I didn’t hit him. He was big enough and strong enough to defend himself, but he had no heart for fighting, and there wasn’t any victory in hitting him. He didn’t fight or even struggle. He whimpered and cried and begged. I wish I could say that a stern justice and a righteous revenge for the wrong that he’d done to me had curled my hands into fists, and punched him. But I can’t be sure. Even now, long years later, I can’t be sure that the violence I did to him didn’t come from something darker, deeper, and far less justifiable than angry retribution. The fact was that I’d been jealous of Maurizio for a long time. And in some part, some small but terrible part, I may have struck at his beauty, and not just his treachery.
On the other hand, of course, I should’ve killed him. When I left him, bloody and broken, near the St. George Hospital, a warning voice told me it wasn’t the end of the matter. And I did hesitate, looming over his body with murder in my eyes, but I couldn’t take his life. Something he’d said, when he was begging me to stop beating him, stayed my hand. He said that he’d named me, that he’d thrown me to the Nigerian thugs when he had to invent someone else who was responsible for his theft, because he was jealous of me. He was jealous of my confidence, my strength, and my friendships. He was jealous of me. And in his jealousy he hated me. And in that, we weren’t so different, Maurizio and I.
It was still with me, all of it, the next day, when the Nigerians were gone and I went to Leopold’s, looking for Didier to return his unused gun. It was still with me, clotting my mind with anger, confused in regret, when I found Johnny Cigar waiting for me outside. It was still there, as I struggled to focus, and understand his words.
‘It’s a very bad thing,’ he said. Anand Rao has killed Rasheed this morning. He cut his throat. It’s the first time, Lin.’
I knew what he meant. It was the first murder in our slum. It was the first time that one slum-dweller had ever killed another in the Cuffe Parade slum. There were twenty-five thousand people in those little acres, and they fought and argued and bickered all the time, but none, not one of them, had ever killed another. And in the shocked moment, I suddenly remembered Madjid. He, too, had been murdered. I’d managed, somehow, to push the thought of his death away from my waking, working mind, but it had been gnawing through the screen of my composure slowly, steadily, all the while. And it broke through then, with the news of Rasheed’s death. And that other murder—the slaughter, Ghani had said—of the old gold smuggler, the mafia don, became confused with the blood that was on Anand’s hands. Anand, whose name meant happy. Anand, who’d tried to talk to me and tell me about it, who’d come to me that day in the slum for help, and found none.
I pressed my hands to my face, and ran them through my hair. The street around us was as busy and colourful as ever. The crowd at Leopold’s were laughing, talking, and drinking, as they usually did. But something had changed in the world that Johnny and I knew. The innocence was lost, and nothing would ever be the same. I heard the words tumbling over and over in my mind. Nothing is ever gonna be the same … Nothing is ever gonna be the same …
And a vision, the kind of postcard that fate sends you, flashed before my eyes. There was death in that vision. There was madness. There was fear. But it was blurred. I couldn’t see it clearly. 1 couldn’t see the detail. I didn’t know if the death and madness were happening to me, or happening around me. And in a sense, I didn’t care. In too many ways of shame and angry regret, I didn’t care. I blinked my eyes, and cleared my swollen throat, and stepped up off the street into the music, the laughter, and the light.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘THE INDIANS are the Italians of Asia,’ Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. ‘It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indian in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna—they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalité. These are nations where love—amore, pyaar—makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love fo
r India, Lin, that my first great love was Italian.’
‘Where were you born, Didier?’
‘Lin, my body was born in Marseilles, but my heart and my soul were born sixteen years later, in Genova.’
He caught the eye of a waiter, and waved a hand lazily for another drink. He’d hardly taken a sip from the drink on the table in front of him, so I guessed that Didier was settling in for one of his longer discourses. It was two hours past noon on a cloudy Wednesday, three months after the Night of the Assassins. The first rains of the monsoon were still a week away, but there was a sense of expectancy, a tension, that tightened every heartbeat in the city. It was as if a vast army was gathering outside the city for an irresistible assault. I liked the week before monsoon: the tension and excitement I saw in others was like the involuted, emotional disquiet that I felt almost all the time.
‘My mother was a delicate and beautiful woman, the photographs of her reveal,’ Didier continued. ‘She was only eighteen years old, when I was born, and not yet twenty when she died. The influenza claimed her. But there were whispers—cruel whispers, and I heard them many times—that my father had neglected her, and was too, how do they say it, tight with his money to pay doctors when she fell ill. Whatever the case, she died before I was two years old, and I have no memory of her.
‘My father was a teacher of chemistry and mathematics. He was much older than my mother when he married her. By the time I started at school, my father was the headmaster. He was a brilliant man, I was told, for only a brilliant Jew could rise to the position of headmaster in a French school. The racisme, the anti-Semitism, in and around Marseilles at that time, so soon after the war, was like a sickness. It was a guilt that pinched at them, I think. My father was a stubborn man—it is a kind of stubbornness that permits one to become a mathematician, isn’t it? Perhaps mathematics is itself a kind of stubbornness, do you think?’
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